Precepts to Live By
Guiding Principles for Engineers (and everyone)
Each profession has its traditions expressed in a basic statement of principles.
Every doctor must swear to uphold the Hippocratic Oath, and the Roman physician
Galen summed up the first key principle of medicine as:
"First, do no harm"
In short, when trying to fix something, don't make things worse.
Don't put your patients in a position where
"The cure is worse than the disease"
Engineers have their own code of ethics as well. The first two Canons of the ASCE code
of ethics require that:
"Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public in the performance of their professional duties."
and
"Engineers shall perform services only in areas of their competence."
Drawing on these ideals, here are some broad principles that I'll suggest should
apply to any professional, and indeed to everyone in society. These should
look familiar to any engineer:
"Know your limitations"
This includes the limitations of your knowledge and ability to collect data; of your
ability to see the whole picture and to foresee what risks are present; and the
limitations of your materials, tools and techniques. I would add to this the
limitations of your client, the work process, and the policy process that
governs decisions about projects.
"Don't promise more than you can deliver"
We shouldn't give false hope; we must not over-sell one answer at the expense of others, just because it is our pet idea, if we don't really know it will work.
Remember Murphy's Law
"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong" is not in any official code of ethics, but it sums up a lot of what we're up against.
Remember the 'Law of Unitended Consequences'
These ideas may come up repeatedly in our seminar. Keep them in mind, and think of
how they apply to the topics we'll discuss.
Dealing with extremes
Sometimes we find ourselves on new ground, solving a problem that's not in any textbook, and facing many uncertainties about
what solutions might work, what could go wrong, and how to predict the exact effects of any change we propose. The larger and
more complex the system in question, the tougher these choices become. For a problem like climate change, we have only
one planet. We can't buy another with all the money in the world if we "break" this one.
Have a Plan B
"Don't burn your bridges" If we're proposing a possible solution to a complex problem, but we're uncertain of how it will work out, we need to keep options open.
If our "solution" turns out to make things worse, we want to be able to roll back the changes to allow us to move on to another option.